REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary

by James Reel

The Comforts & Romance
Of The Overstuffed Bookstore

BARBARA KINGSOLVER HAS GRACED TW3 with a heartfelt farewell to The Book Mark, a venerable bookseller in Tucson, our mutual home town (see Guest Shot 6: Obit For My Guardian Angels). Dearly loved by too few other bibliophiles, the place is about to close at this writing, but the owner is hinting that the store may be revived in a scaled-down version.

Local news coverage and even much of Kingsolver's passionate essay concentrated on the story's business angle: Another locally owned shop is forced out by customer-stealing chain stores that enjoy unfair financial advantages.

There's some truth to this, but it isn't as if we'll lose all access to whatever oddball books we Tucsonans want to buy. Borders and Barnes & Noble display vast inventories, and can special-order whatever their buyers deem unfit for the regular stock. And, of course, TW3 readers need only promenade left to The Bookstall to satisfy their literary longings.

The real loss to readers where the chain stores are rattling in and the independents are being tossed aside like battered, cheap paperbacks has to do with the aesthetics of everyday life. The Book Mark was about the last new-book seller in town to maintain a true bookstore atmosphere. I allude not so much to the attentive ministrations of the employees rightly praised by Barbara Kingsolver. I mean the space itself. It was a labyrinth lined with beckoning tomes, burdened shelves struggling toward the ceiling, unexpected side-rooms sucking you into pockets of bookish claustrophobia.

The reading life is both solitary and exploratory, and so should be the reader's trip to the bookstore. A leisurely browse along the shelves might lead you into some cul-de-sac aisle, where you can be alone with a book for a few minutes, getting to know it before announcing your engagement at the cash register.

The original owners of Tucson's late, lamented Haunted Bookshop understood this, and built a few nooks and crannies into their store. It in no way resembled a bewebbed, haunted house, but it was a fairly private place where you could commune with the ghosts of dead authors, and get a quick thrill from living writers, too.

Even Powell City of Books in Portland, Ore. has maintained a cloistered atmosphere despite its expansion to Vatican proportions. Over the years, Powell took over every building on its block, and became a delightful jumble of ramps, stairs and dead-ends, all leading to myriad, delightfully unexpected volumes.

Otherwise, across the country it's generally up to the used-book stores to uphold this tradition of musty mystery. But in Tucson, even wonderful Bookman's Used Books failed us when it moved from its now-demolished warren to a former supermarket. I've been uncomfortable there ever since.

What I dislike about Bookman's isn't its stock, or its staff, or its crush of customers; a crowded bookstore is always a sign of hope for civilization. My problem with Bookman's is that it's so open and light and airy. It's less a bookstore than a supermarket of books.

And that's precisely the atmosphere in the big chains. Thousands of feet of floorspace remain open and easily navigable. The aroma of brewing coffee has replaced the smell of musty tomes. The stock has been selected and displayed to sell as quickly as possible.

The romance is gone.

And the staffers don't always know their stock well enough. Whenever I spoke to the staff at The Book Mark, I could tell I was dealing with people who were widely read, and experienced in the book trade. Such people work at the chains, too, but not enough. The Book Mark hired book lovers; the chains hire employees. That's what happens in big business.

The other problems with the chains are serious, but don't worry me so much. Yes, publishers effectively pay the chains to stack their discounted blockbusters (like, ahem, Kingsolver's wonderful Poisonwood Bible) by the front door. And editors at major publishing houses have been known to call buyers for the chains to ask whether a certain book might sell-- before even accepting the manuscript.

Kingsolver declares in her essay: "To put it bluntly, chain stores and publishers are in league to manipulate what Americans will see, purchase, and read." She's absolutely right, but the chains exist to make money, which means they must be sensitive to consumer demand. If we wave our pocketbooks and ask for some older novel by Haruki Murakami, or a better translation of Euripides, or -- for Kingsolver enthusiasts -- Walking the Twilight, a collection of stories by women writers of the Southwest, the chains will find them for us.

Of course, I found all those things at The Book Mark without having to ask. I could have, too, by shopping online at amazon.com, as do many readers. But gazing into my computer screen and caressing the mouse on its pad just can't compare to wandering a store, chancing into an encounter with some unexpected title, slipping it off the shelf, sampling a few passages and inhaling its new-book smell while crouching in a book-lined womb.

Despite our sentimental fantasies, books are merely commodities, as the chain stores make clear. Yet, they can be so much more than that -- more than a title in some catalog, or an antiseptic bibliographic citation online. They become a self-contained universe the moment wood pulp meets fingertips.

Nowhere is this more true than in the embrace of an overstuffed bookstore.

Reel's Archive

Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading

Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book

Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience

Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure

Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers

Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile

Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness

Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!

Reel Politik 9: The Argument

Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community

Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors

Reel Politik 12: How To Read For Yourself

Reel Politik 13: Lies, Damn Lies & The MFA Novel

Reel Politik 14: The Merchant-Ivory Connection (ML 100, Round 1)

Reel Politik 15: Who's Stuffing The Ballot Box? (ML 100, Round 2)

Reel Politik 16: Interactive Fiction: It Still Doesn't Compute

Reel Politik 17: Feel The Burn

Reel Politik 18: Whose Life Is This, Anyway?

Reel Politik 19: Buy My Book. Please!



James Reel's new book, Tucson: A CitySmart Guidebook, is published by John Muir Publications. Reel is the arts and entertainment editor of The Arizona Daily Star, a contributor to Fanfare, and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.

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